education. >> good afternoon sarah, how are are you today speech i'm good, thank you for having me here one i'm so excited, i love your book, paying the price. it was a book that is so full of important data and very complex data about the implications of financial aid and income and been able to graduate college. but it was so readable. >> guest: thank you. that was the goal. >> can i read from the book. it is is intended to be a wake-up call, brings the lives of students front and center and avails their financial struggles. ensuring the american public has a clear sense of how and why financial aid is appealing to get students to graduation. this will help us find effective solutions. what drove you to do this study.

>> guest: this particular study came out of a long-standing set of research of mine on why some people finish college and other people don't. i have been interested in that question for most of my career, one of the things that experts have said matters to how students do in college is money. but when they examined the effects of financial a program they don't find very much. for some reason the effects of financial aid like when measured with official a statistics they don't like to be that large. in 2008i was approached by a philanthropist who said we are going to do something incredibly generous. we are going to give out money to students across wisconsin and it will help them finish college. i really wonder, will that work? really, because there has been other studies that indicate that it's a drop in the bucket. will it make the difference they

hope sp1 you know what you did differently, many many books i read will take a snapshot. this is the graduating cohort. and they don't look at what happens in between. you did something very different. >> guest: in order to understand how the program works i felt like getting financial aid is an evolving experience. the price that you pay for the first year of college is not the same price you pay for the second year. bring the people know that. it doesn't take experts to tell them that. that meant that what we did was follow the same group of students over the next six years to see how their lives changed and the extent to which their resources and how the program affected the resources how that shifted. we got to see dynamics unfold

that i do think are commonly missed. >> i think you are about to see nuances. that is something something that gets missed when you're doing snapshots. you move all of the in between's. most people, when they talk about the cost of college think of tuition and fees. that is what they think of. your book elaborates on what the true cost of college is. can you tell me a little about what it is and the audience about what it really takes to go to college and what a truly cost. >> guest: it is far more than tuition and fees. the federal government knows that. and what it listens the cost of attending it includes things like getting a roof over roof over your head, having food to eat and transportation. again the conversation keeps going back to tuition and fees. that's unfortunate. tuition and fees are less than half, sometimes only only 30% of the total cost of attending college.

the real hang-up that students have are the need to pay their rent. to pay their utility. to buy food. they can't do those things in the same way when they are in college because they need to spend time in the classroom. it is those kinds of things that trip them up over time. it wasn't the tuition and fees. that is when for example they would end up taking out a loan. it wasn't to pay the tuition, it was it was to pay the cost of living while going to school. >> host: i think those are the things that people fail to appreciate. i work at a large university and it is not uncommon for me to speak to students and have students who truly worry about things like can i pay my metro card which enables them to get to work, to school, back home. verses, can i eat lunch this week. they are they are not just hanging out having fun. talk a little bit about some narratives, what you did was you

instilled them in some student's individual experiences and can you talk a little bit about that in terms of what the students were struggling with on a daily basis? >> the. >> guest: there all 3000 students in the study. the book focuses on six of them to help the reader understand what it looks like up close. these students have gone through norm's challenges. i want the reader to be able to see them. consider someone like chloe. chloe was a young woman who grew up on a form in rural wisconsin. she had a horse and thought, it would be cool when i'm older to be able to take care of animals. which i think is a normal ambition. she went off to a two-year college so she could do that. while many people think that community colleges free in this country, chloe was one who quickly figured out that was not true. so she had very little money,

her family was assessed by the federal government to pay only a couple thousand dollars per year for college. that is after her grants came due. she was facing a bill over 10,000 dollars per year. she was asking herself how am i supposed to do that? just because the federal government says my mom can contribute that 2000 dollars, she can't, they are wrong. so chloe sold can't, they are wrong. so chloe sold her horse to go to college. >> host: to me that was such appointment example of the extreme that students will go to because they want that education >> guest: she did want to. i don't think she is alone. i. i think sometimes what happens is grandmas sell something or the cousins pitching something. families go to great lengths to make college possible. even. even with that money she was not okay. she knew about student loans but wanted to avoid them because her mother was struggling with a lot

of credit card debt. chloe was afraid of ending in that circumstance. instead, she she took on that one job, but two. the reason was because she cannot get get enough hours from a single employer. she worked at kohl's, a department store store in wisconsin. she also worked at pet smart which makes a lot of sense for what she was trying to do in school. she found herself doing those jobs and doing what so many people told her to do which is to take five classes at a time to get done quickly. two jobs, five classes do not add up. she was commuting back and forth, running all over the place and she started to find yourself falling asleep in class. again, she knew she was exerting too much energy and she was not doing enough studying. by the time she said this is not going to work for me and i need other money and she applied for student loan, student loans

don't just come through immediately. it took more than one month for the loan money to arrive. by that time her grades were so bad she had been placed on academic probation and these days she is no longer in college. she has it debt and no degree. >> host: that is what worries me about students. we talk about the american dream and you talk about it being broken for a group of students. a student like chloe comes in, she is working two jobs, she's doing the best she can, she is trying to contribute at home. there's also so much shame involved in going to a faculty member, teacher and say, on struggling, what can i do? i have seen students fall off before when it may be in october they started to try to find some help or lifelike the group through the cysto. but it overwhelms them quickly. then when we then when we think about what is out there, you get

minimum wage jobs if you don't have a college degree. as you know from the book, chloe joined the navy. that was another astounding thing. talk a little bit about what our preconceived notion is of the college experience and how chloe's lens was different. >> guest: when i went to see her after she dropped out, i had to fly to florida from wisconsin to meet her. i did that because when a student drops out of college that us last time we see them. i wanted to sit down with her and see what was going on. what was clear is that she was having trouble finding work, work that would pay. being in the navy, for her,

created a sense of structure and gave her a sense that she could at least get, she put it three square meals a day, a roof over her head, while she was trying to pursue her career. that it didn't mean however that she did not want to be in college. she just knew. she just knew the college experience she had did not seem to care, frankly the school didn't seem to care that she was falling short in other areas. so while we talk about 18 euros and that's what she was, they want all of this freedom and to go off and have nobody tell them what to do. i don't think they are actually asking to be completely cut loose and shoved off a cliff and settled with an economic situation that puts them at such risk. we are telling them to go to school and then saddling them in this way. it really does feel like a betrayal. that's why i put that in the title, we have broken their trust. >> host: i think that strikes a cord with me all of the time. a lot of of public universities are also on resource, or in equitably resourced.

if you go to a more elite school, the ratio ratio of advisers to students is much better than if you have an advisor and trying to advise seven or 800 students. and the students have many problems. can i ask you, little digression, little digression, talk about your own story. you worked through college, right? >> guest: yes. i went to an institution where my mother was an adjunct. so for some reason those were the good old days and that meant that i got free tuition at that institution, which is amazing. that is a big discount. but my parent did not have college savings but in no way did their two incomes didn't qualify for a period so i decided that i would just work. i was lucky enough that working at the restaurant allowed me to pocket enough tips and i was

decent enough as a waitress that i could make ends meet by working about 40 hours per week. sometimes i was cocktail he then other times i was doing burgers are pancakes, or do you want sera but that. i was able to do that. the prices and cost of living today are so much higher in the minimum wage is so sad and frankly the tip minimum wage has gone down. partly because you put tips on a credit card so you have to pay taxes. but these things no longer add up. while i worked in college and you may have two, that is not going to be a sustainable story. >> host: i think that is an important point to make. so many people say i worked through with no problems. but the world is not the same. the cost of rising education, the cost of tuition, we have a very reasonably priced tuition and even some of our students struggle. but at a lot of other

publics, the tax have been lifted on tuition. their tuitions look more like private tuition. when you talked about first is the first year tuition. the financially package comes in and you say great. what happens the second year typically? >> is. >> is so many schools are giving students extra grant tape for the first year of college to get them to come to school. the family finds out in the second year that grant is not available. intuition went up. so over time, the colleges become more expensive with each year you stay. students are really taken aback by that. there's one thing that people need to know going in is that what you are given is that first year of college price tag is not going to be what you're going to pay in the fourth year. >> host: one of the other misconceptions is the fact that the perception is out there that students, they they are spending their financial aid dollars on

fancy restaurants, going to bars, any kind of luxury that you can imagine and so therefore, you are not really spending where it is meant to be. i want to read a quote, because it really struck me, the quote about buying black pants. which is something you and i, and you have young children, i have grown children and everybody knows they need an interview suit, so i just wanted to quote this and have you expand a little bit on it. the quotas, i don't spend it on luxury items. i don't buy stuff that i just want. i actually never. i actually never really have unless there's a need for it. three weeks ago i went and got myself some nice black pants, which you need for college business for interviews. it is my only pair of black pants and i got a nice button up sheep because you need to look nice for interviews.

other than that, it is just, dues for the sorority and if i need things for class or college. i try not to go out by food too much. i don't spend a lot on food. but i do buy some applesauce and milk, just breakfast items. i do have snack atoms, hot chocolate, but that's just it. i can get by without buying luxury items. hot chocolate was a luxury item for this woman. >> guest: people with few resources which is who these financial aid recipients are have one for long time how to manage scarce resources. they don't throw things away. there so many things been said about college students that might apply to some people but they mainly apply to people whose parents are paying for college. who are at ely, elite, private institutions would have the luxury of going to the art museum or having a party are going on a spring break. the vast majority of today's undergraduates don't do any of those things. the data that is being used to paint that picture of these

other folks has nothing to do with the data on the financial aid recipients. they don't line up. we do not see students spending things in frivolous ways. we asked, we did budget logs with them, we know what they spent their time on. there are two things that were notable to me, one thing that is never asked about in studies of undergraduates is the time you spend studying. they never ask it you do you spend time taking care of other people. we saw lots of people making that kind of time investment. even if they were not working at a paid job, they, they were working, caring for someone else. that was such an important thing. the other thing that we saw was far from being out partying or drinking with the money, they are trying to help their families with it. so they were back home trying to make sure that mom's bills were being paid, trying to make sure that younger brothers and sisters were okay.

these were not 30-year-olds taken taking care of their own children. these were 18 -year-olds taking care of the families that help them get to college in the first place. >> and that to me is another very important point. because what you see is an expected family contribution. talk a little bit about the negative financial contribution. i see it all of the time at city college where i am. i see students that are paying for helping their grandparents, paying for medical costs, really using any money they have to try to get back. they are not getting financial contribution from the parents because quite frankly, they cannot afford it. >> guest: that's right. the term expected family contribution is in it official term that is presumptuous. the number number it reaches is a fake number.

first, it doesn't take into account one of the most important things in the family's financial resources, their debt. it might decide that a family can contribute ask, but it is completely ignoring the debt that family possessions that may prevent them from doing so. in addition, lots of people are working in high school these days to help their families. when they go to college, even if it is down the street but they have to spend time at college, the family loses that income. that is how we can sometimes reach a negative effective family contribution. the problem is no negative numbers are allowed in the federal system. so they put the number is zero and say you don't have to contribute anything but they don't say let's give money back to the family. which is in fact what the students are doing with the resources. it's really a pretend figure, so many people put in the statistical model and say it doesn't matter much when we are predicting college completion.

well, that is because it is a fake fake number. it is inaccurate. a measurement error is a big deal, this is it a number plagued with measurement air. that's disturbing disturbing because it's vague, it's a bureaucratic system. tell me a little bit about that. that is the think the other students come in and they say fast for is easy to fill out. i think you need a phd to fill it up quite frankly, but talk about the bureaucratic nature of the whole package when the student begins. >> guest: it's a small american bureaucratic tragedy. this thing is a mess. there is a lot of attention for policymakers right now in dealing with the past five. i'm concerned about what happens after the pass by. as students know, after the pass for you find out you're not getting enough money and then

you also find out these extra rules. so to actually to keep your money from year-to-year you have to do a bunch of things. one is that even if you stay at the same school you have to keep refiling the fafsa every year. even if nothing has changed. that's not that's not easy because of the paperwork involved. you also have to keep up with satisfactory academic progress. if we could simply explain what that wasn't help students to it that would be great. every single school has different rules for that. what it means is the students have to get certain grades but they also have to complete a certain number of courses. if you go back to your own experiences in school, when a class didn't turn out to be the way you thought it would be a nose too hard, are not what you are looking for where the professor was terrible, you dropped it. if you're trying to get your grades up you took the easier classes too. the strategies will backfire if

you are on financially. so people doing regular things that most people do in college, it will actually cause them to lose their financial aid and not surprisingly, they are taken aback. >> host: and at city college where trying to tell students that if you drop this course you drop a lower level, if you drop a lower lower level your financially goes away. and sometimes they don't have a choice because, do i get enough? or a d when i have a dream to become something that an effort do not course one hell. tell me about how some of your in this longitudinal study dealt with those issues. >> guest: they dealt with them pretty badly. even as a faculty member who students now know that i know know some of this stuff and i know this goes on, so they bring me their cases and say something like my dad got

sick and i missed school and i miss that class a lot. i'm aware of the potential consequences and so we weigh them. i can help help them navigate this. these things don't make sense. you should be able to drop a class if you need to without it hurting you too much. so we saw students who literally dropped below a full-time status and all of a sudden, part-time pays half of what full-time pays but they are living expenses are not half. so the formula for distributing the money is off base. what it usually did was cause them overtime to move slower through college. that is the last thing you want to see. the more time is spent in college, the more costs. if we want students to go faster, we can't tell them to go

faster, they are not stupid, they would love to go faster. we do not set up the conditions under which they can go faster. that is to give them the support. i work at temple university now in one of our programs does something that in my study we actually found that really works. pay students not to work. students need money, so if they can get it from grants instead of through working then they can take more classes and were class and they are less distracted. they can spend more time in school. >> host: is that for work study or different. >> guest: this is an effort to help students finish in four years instead of five years by taking more classes. work-study is actually a really popular program, i love i love say that because so few programs are popular and liked by students. work-study is the idea that we can provide you with work on your campus. the federal government actually provides the resources to pay for that. now, some of the people think about grant recipient should get get work-study and it would be okay.

in my study i describe the trends over time and the utilization of work-study money available to pell grant recipients in the public sector. today, less than one in ten pell grant recipients nationwide who attend a public college public college or university is allocated any work-study funding. the max they usually can earn is about $2000. it is hardly a solution unless we revise the program to create more resources for the people who are already deemed eligible for them. and unless it really pays. >> host: i think that is one of the real challenges. the other thing is that one of the people in your book talked about how $2400 was part of the work-study and part of the formula but the person was never able to get the job, which means the money goes away. that doesn't that doesn't mean the cost goes away.

>> guest: they call it magic money or fake money, it shows up in your package and says you have it. but the next step is going to get the job. lots of places don't provide you with any information on how to do that. one young woman we met went to forever 21 is set i want to work for her and i have work-study work-study money. and they said, sorry we don't take that. and you know at first we all smiled a little when we heard the story but it's not funny. she wasn't given information and by the time she figure things out there were no work-study positions left at her institution. this is a very broken program that could be fixed it should be fixed. >> host: it's very interesting and very often universities leave a lot of money on the table. you talked about the disparity cross the wisconsin system in terms of how work-study and monies are allocated. could you talk a little bit about this? that surprised me because i assumed the media medium schools

we get the most aid with most low-income students and that didn't seem to be the case. >> guest: it's not. one of the basic premise of educational funding in this country, at least in theory is that the money should follow the knee. so so if you have more students were low income at a school than the school should be getting more resources from the state so i can help the students graduate. in wisconsin, and and i suspect it's true elsewhere, while on average the state appropriation, meeting the support given to institutions from state legislature, while it has to client overtime on a per student a per student basis, it has not declined at the same right or in the same way for all institutions. in wisconsin we are very segregated, but by income and race enough in the city. the city of milwaukee is where the concentration of people of color are. it is home to one of the most troubled school systems and yet the institutions there, the the public sector, gets far less resources than the institutions at the rest of the state that's

are better off students. in fact i . out that uw milwaukee which has many pell grant recipients and lots of students of color, they get less money on a per student basis then uw madison who are wonderful high educations and have every advantage in front of them. >> host: also many out-of-state students. >> guest: that's right. they're very different very different institutions. it doesn't necessarily make economic sense to under resourced the schools that are educating the students who frankly will be lost in today's economy if they don't get to greece. so the milwaukee price per student in our study was 19% higher than it was for students at the rest of the state. yet to they they were lower income. >> host: wow. and they try to make ends meet.

>> guest: and they try to make ends meet in a city that is struggling like so many others. it's lost its manufacturing base. it's struggling with the deep and concentrated poverty, struggling with violence, with failing school systems, yet it has all of these hard-working young people there who got the message that an education is the way to a better life. they're just trying to do school and they are paying a steep price. >> host: that also gets 'is one of the things he talked about in the book was the fact that students tend to stay close to home of their low-income. they're not to pick themselves up and go to california. the issue of living at home, being viewed as much less expensive and having financially change as a function of whether the student is living on the campus are living at home. can you talk a little about that? most of my students at city college are commuters. we have 1600 bed resident hall but most are in and out of subways and bus lines and are

living at home. it's not necessarily easier for them. >> guest: no, it's it's not. yet it's a popular recommendation. just live at home. so what you think is going to happen when they live at home? first, the financial aid system assumes they will face lower prices. in fact, it is actually legal for student to assume the student doesn't pay a dime for rent, food, transportation, most schools were given that living at home student some money for transportation in the soup they have that expense. but lots of them assume that mom and dad take care of everything. this is incorrect. incorrect. frankly, it is very presumptuous. mac and families today across the border struggling, that includes a lot of the middle-class and families make ends meet together. they do it by sharing resources. if a long-standing strategy and i think it is a lovely

tradition. it is a family thing to do. well, that means that student may very well be contributing to the rents, they may even be paying the rents. they may be living there with a family member to make it possible to make it possible to have a roof over their head. they're utilizing their financial money to make it happen. but the school is in the amount of help they can get from financially by assuming they don't need anything. . . . and at the same time they need to help the students and

children to help them make ends meet. can you talk a little about the mental because that is one thing i noticed in particular there was a student talking about he went out and he was drinking and i happen to study high risk drinking and college-age students and a lot of it is related to stress and how to fit in and what the preconceived notions are. mental health is such a national issue can you talk about it from the low income students perspective? >> guest: we considered the possibility that there would be effects beyond just the pocketbook and i agree we know nationally it is an issue and when we turned to look at it there were tremendous numbers that were already depressed when they enter college. the situations they faced did not improve. the young man you mentioned his

name is tired w tire recall in . like so many people he found out he had a medical issue that prevented after the first year and like a lot of young men he didn't cope very well. he was stressed out about that and the money wasn't coming together and he also just really wanted to party. i thought it was important to share his story because there are people out there that are not making perhaps the best decisions but they are common positions in the sense of what young people doing that sort of time. oh and he turned to alcohol sometimes to hide what was going on with him. he talked about the pain he was having that he had to live in his father's basement with a curtain hung up to create a bedroom for him because he couldn't make ends meet. he kept crashing his car or getting put into jail overnight

and he said i wish i could just stop this nonsense. but it's upside down for him and a lot of people. families are struggling with the fact they invest in a strategy to help their children become economically secure by making college possible for them and when things don't work out as planned, and they are frequently not working out these days, it is a consequence not only for the students but the appearance and even the younger siblings so than they are asking what's going to happen to me now. he went off and got nothing but debt. why would i go to college. we will be paying for that for a long time. >> host: the other thing that struck me is how many students turn to the for-profit sector to try to get a degree which is incredibly expensive and i had a

hard time understanding this kind of for-profit that maybe they can help me out. >> guest: underfunding and not giving them the resources to do outreach to provide all the courses at the time of day the students need them lead the students to the for-profits. they make them feel wanted and offer aid which is really just loans. there'they receive in federal ps out there like welfare reform that limit the number of things that count as an education and those are mainly delivered by the for-profit sector so we are

pushing people into debt and this is little money on instruction and a whole lot of money on advertising recruitment. there is a book coming out soon that lays this out and i think it's such an important part of the story and part of why dealing with funding the public sector produced so much good for this country not only because it would be more affordable but because we could save some people from being diverted to this for-profit sector when they end up with a worthless credential and a debt. >> host: i know that it's a struggle to get a world-class education to students on a daily basis given everything else that goes on. the other place you don't mention it explicitly but i keep

seeing it, the use of distance ahead. let's go online. there is a place for online education absolutely that i wonder why when some students who may have a computer but operating systems that are six versions older can you talk about that because that's a place where people say maybe that can help. >> guest: we talk about understanding the problem and matching the policy to the problem. distance education or online education is a great source for me because i've been thinking about taking additional courses in economics. i already have a phd and i know how to learn and i could easily do it online. sounds good. but for the students coming out

of a situation where they've had a bad educational experience, they need a teacher to sit down with them in a sort of interpersonal way to get to know them. how is the teacher going to know that they are not eating or don't have a roof over their heads if they never see them? homeless students we have growing in numbers how are they to go online and do their coursework? why would he push this at the time that more and more students who have the greatest needs are our demographic by what we push a solution that is so mismatched with that reality? >> host: i believe there is an important place for the distance online education but that's one of the things i think about because very frequently students while talk to me about not having a quiet place to study or place where they can run their

computer and there's a lot of competing needs. sometimes yes there is a computer lab on campus but the line for the computers are so long. anyone that's tried to get stuck being done with lots of students that's not the right way to do it. >> host: it's an interesting issue. you also touched upon food insecurity and i know there was a study where 40% of the students reported being food insecure meaning they were not sure where or when the next meal was coming. we talked about the importance of lunch programs from k-12 because you can't concentrate if you are hungry and haven't eaten in a couple of days.

it's not pro- team rich healthful food that marriage is the brain. can you talk about that and the kind of gap between k-12? >> guest: we have a story we like to tell about how being in college is getting any on the noodle diet. they also tell ourselves couch surfing is normal. maybe you don't know who you going out with some of this coucit's thiscouch or another. it's these stereotypes that are frankly doing harm because what is happening right now as w is o have students whose resources are in sufficient and they are ending up not only on a roman diet but sometimes without a meal coming at all and this shouldn't be surprising because we have a growing poverty rate among children. the poverty rate is off the

charts and not getting much better and these children are going to college eventually and guess what, it doesn't disappear. what disappears is the safety net that we have built up around them to make sure they were able to learn in elementary school, middle school and high school so we make sure they get milk in the morning when they show up in seventh or eighth grade and we make sure we offer them at least some kind of lunch even if it's pizza. they graduate from hig high schl and show up to college often times community college and they are shocked to see that now they are being charged and it's not like they don't get that food has vowed you it's just they rightly say do you think i just became wealthy? i'm continuing my education and i continue to have these financial circumstances and the limited financial aid that you are giving mwere giving me is gr tuition, not even a full tuition. it's the same thing with

transportation. the student in new york city that gets their coverage to become natural coverage with a card they are confused for good reason. it would be so straightforward to do a commonsense thing like expanded school programs into higher education so that we can make sure that hunger doesn't get in the way of diplomas. >> guest: getting the students threw in a short period of time compared to what happens with the metro cards, it's proactive advertising and sharing with the students and getting it through the developmental education quickly.

these models exist and i'm proud because they've done wonderful things. how do we get those out to the greater community? >> guest: the program does cost money. i think the natural car or the f the program is so important and i know we cannot disentangle the that part compared to the whole thing but if other colleges could take the lesson and start to negotiate with the agencies to figure out how to start with that even if it just means they open a food pantry or create some emergency housing on their campus i think what would be helpful is to just put practices and policies in place to recognize these things happen.

you will not be able to solve everything overnight but there are too many campuses that assume because somebody gets financial aid if they are okay. they are not okay and that is why i said this is a wake-up call. it's time for everyone else that is in charge to start doing something about it. >> host: did the students that madison do any better than milwaukee if you look at the same demographic? >> guest: to some extent and it's hard to say that because they start off with more academic for patients but also to be honest even a recipient comes from the higher income bracket than the students at the other school so they already start with this other

disadvantages like the far greater resources available so the counselor ratios and the things available so they can ask questions of people is more widely available because there are fewer students. at the same time i want to note sending more students to the selective institutions isn't a solution to the problem. they are by definition selecti selective. we need to build these support is at the schools where ordinary americans will continue to go to college and we need to make sure that those places including those that keep ou out low incoe people with varying missions to become admissionbe coded admisss don't halt all the money. this is important. i think that we have a system of

financing that goes beyond what we are currently talking about. >> host: it is an interesting dilemma that you have because when you are in the crowded schools, and they are crowded, you've got 26,000 that are running seven days a week, all hours of the day and the night. it's hard to get enough staff and administration. you saw that in milwaukee as well. can you tell me about the technical university and how did students choose one versus another? >> guest: there are a lot of people concerned if we create policies that help people go into the public sector this will just be bad because they will have a low quality experience kind of like what happened when

they opened up their doors however many years ago. we don't need to repeat that mistake. if we have a policy there will be more resources to expand the capacity and they have shown over and over that is essential. the question of the technical college is a lot like a community college. they have a bifurcated system but a lot of times what happens in terms of choosing between the university of wisconsin milwaukee it was a matter of price. it's the most expensive public institution in the state because it gets the least resources in the state. when you are somebody were a

thousand dollars makes a big difference you start choosing on those things. the other thing is they are a little differentiated in the kind of things they offer, and i've met a lot of folks at the technical college who were not a ever sure that they would be college material but they are recognizing the imperative to be there and sometimes they are looking for a second chance and that college offers such wonderful opportunities. it's great to see at the same time some of those students are one step from living on the street and some of them are sleeping in their car. the faculty are reaching into their own pockets to pay for things for students. that doesn't happen often. when that is happening on such a

frequent basis, that's not a personal problem, that is a policy issue and we need to make that stop. >> host: i have a fabulous faculty and it isn't uncommon for them to help them out with their metro cards or if the student doesn't have enough money they will take the students to get a paper and it will be available at 2:00 in the morning on a saturday because they are so dedicated to teaching the student body population. and this is a generational issue because when we see one student truly succeed, if changes. >> guest: i think we use this word in each institution as if it were the same job anywhere.

we are not doing the same job as professors. i'm sur sure they've had to reah into their pockets but i hardly think it comes up very often. what they partly due because it helps to enhance the relationship just to show them that you see them and you care and recently i was thinking i can't take this anymore, so many students are going hungry i have to talk about it and i created this new fund and its about giving students money quickly that it is faculty and students to gather and the point is i am distributing emergency aid directly to the faculty to give it out as they see fit and the reason for that is they are the front-line workers in the front line workers in the classroom and let's be honest most of them are not making very

much money. they are the people reaching in their pockets. these are often times faculty having trouble feeding their own families at the stilted in their pockets and that is unattainable city so we are trying this new approach. i created a nonprofit with a couple of other women and i put it on my website because enough. i look at the students and i am trying to shape the social policy. i was walking down the street in philadelphia the other day and i tripped over a woman and i saw her sign is a graduat the gradut at rutgers, homeless. i'm getting ready to come here to talk to you and i'm tripping over a homeless woman who is trying to pursue a phd.

something is so wrong we have to open our eyes. to me that is what i loved about this book. it went against the normal opinions and stereotypes because they get squeezed in some ways and in other ways because they don't have the financial wherewithal to get into the system but not enough to get the aid that the students need. but to me it's all about the student success hell do we get from here to there. he came from the united nations and had an interesting story that talked about the importance that it truly does take a village to give students through. >> guest: he was one of those folk that made me so hopeful

because like you said he grew up on the united reservation. they provide a very generous college scholarships to the folks that managed to make it to college so he was very lucky. he was one of the only students we saw who was able to go to a four-year institution and paid virtually nothing. it was almost entirely covered by his scholarship and that mattered that would also matter, because sometimes he would still run short of funds would also matter was his mom saying we really struggled to get you here. she worked as a hotel maid and he sometimes did. we've been working and saving for years. you are not working during your

first year of college because you need to get your grades established and get on your path. and he listened to her. whenever he faced a difficult decision he started to take on a job and things like that he would turn to his famil return y members, his older brothers, his aunt and a chicken for advice and support and they uniformly stood with him. that turned out to be so important. at the end of the day i'm afraid somebody will look at him and say that the student of color and he's lucky because they get all the scholarships. no, he grew up in a rough situation and the people that made it possible for him was not the federal government and it was the community that stood together and said we can't afford to have students drop out

of college. we will make this investment and pay for it and it worked. norbert finished college and is employed and is going to go back to the reservation now and be contributing members of society and that is the power. we are all about ourselves let's fight for it. that's the current system and it doesn't work. >> host: how do we engage communities in that struggle there was a woman that talked about being the first in her tried to go to college and her parents were at the graduation and it was the most heartwarming amazing experience because what you see is when she got that degree, all of a sudden her

cousins were now attending college and it shifted a generation. sometimes we think it's an individual. we don't understand the implications that it shifts an entire generation. >> guest: and there are studies that show us this. there've been scholars that trace the effects of the g.i. bill and what happened to that generation because they got educated in a way they otherwise couldn't afford. there's a study of what happened to the women that were educated opening its doors in the 1970s. they track them for 30 years and the effects on their children. it lifted them up. we have to stop thinking of it as an individual benefit. it isn't. the economists will say you don't know this. we don't know it because we don't collect data.

you don't know what you don't want to ask about. the social benefits were so substantial that we need to shift the funding in that direction. these are things we cannot afford not to fund. who would deny a child the opportunity to go to college, would you look the child in the eye and say it's not for you? you told them they can when they are little and it's only when they get big you tell them they are not cut out for it. we have to double down the same way we did when we made high school free. it's harder for a community to imagine what it would look like if people stop their education after elementary school, and we did used to. when i asked how many grades my

grandmother did they laughed. i am the granddaughter of these two incredible women and that's what we need to get to. your book really highlighted it. where do you want to go from here? >> guest: something i didn't know when i started there are other programs out there. they are not as good as they used to be but a love of students are navigating other bureaucracies. they seem to assume if you were from a poor family you wouldn't get to college and so what i

want to work on next is addressing those costs to a lion social policy. there are housing policies that discourage people from "and college students. to get food stamps in college you have to work 20 hours a week. that doesn't align with the goal of helping students finish college so how do we bridge these things and create a system people are better trained to know something about poverty how do we create a system that acknowledges colleges more than going to parties on the weekend experience. it's hard work and it's taking over the lives of so many.

>> host: this has been such a fun conversation. the work you do can have such a tremendous impact and its important work to be done because it is easy to marginalize. >> guest: i'm glad that i was able to release a book and talk about it. hispanic thank you again so much. this was just absolutely wonderful. the next book i can't wait to read it it will be another

change making the.and welcome welcome to live coverage of day number two of the southern festival of books in downtown nashville. several authors i had including kelly oliver's examination of how women are represented in the media and the memoir my father and atticus finch but here are two authors talking about race and inequality. andrew has written about the life of. wallace, the first african-american basketball player, and eriksson has written